Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Fruitcake

Port Meadow is a large and ancient grazing ground in Oxfordshire. It is a floodmeadow, flanked by a thin, brambled-over stretch of the Thames, and no matter the season it is hung with a sense of the sodden. Mud and mists linger above, but there is also the feeling, as you make your way across the soft – ominously soft – ground, of something congressional below. Obscure half-paths emerge from out of the turf, criss-cross briefly, then disappear. The enameled colours of the narrow boats that sidle up against the abrupt riverbanks are the only real brightness anywhere. Cows, sometimes ponies, happen alongside you – sudden companions, made of meat and vapour.

“Freemen” and “Commoners of Wolvercote” have grazing rights on this wide, flat ground that has never once been ploughed, and it is a place where peripatetics become dwellers, and the more conventionally lodged – briskly out for walks in their green wellies - are the transients. One November day on the meadow I stumbled across a small and straggly television crew interviewing a group of Travellers. The water-proofed interviewer asked his wrap-up question: “So what’s the one thing most necessary in life?” Clearly bored by this quest for three seconds of nomadic wisdom, no one answered. Then a young freeman, a dreadlocked girl, leaned close in to the microphone and said, flat as a penny, “Cake.”

I have long been of the same opinion. An early and famous tantrum of mine was thrown over being removed from a café, and thus from the chance of cake, when the price list arrived at the small formica table. I am proud to report that my rage was so shattering, my aunt and uncle pledged then and there to remain childless for life. Since then, nothing much has changed. I happily rearrange my life, and the lives of others, around the pursuit of good cake and if I sniff such a cake on the wind, I am not to be deterred until I am sat down before it, fork in hand. But recently I realized – like the returning memory of a strange and portentous dream, hours later when the day is at its most raw and real – that I have been subduing a long dark craving for a particular kind of cake – a cake I rarely see anymore, a cake that lay submerged beneath my pursuit of other cakeish delights - fruitcake. As the winter months started closing in, I was gripped by the stubborn clutching upward of this old and betrayed taste. It had been, I calculated, seven years since I had made or tasted fruitcake. A week made of years. The need for fruitcake lay in me like a fallen clock weight.

A good fruitcake is made well ahead of itself. In my childhood, our Christmas fruitcakes were made by my Nana in Birmingham and fetched home to be iced by my mother in London. Nana made the cakes because no-one could make them like her. In her kitchen, pounds and ounces meant nothing – her cakes were made from handfuls. I called her recently – she has been eighty-three for at least ten years – hoping to reconstruct the gist of the recipe with her. But like the Travellers on the meadow, Nana was uninterested in passing along her knowledge. She denied that she had any knowledge. There was no recipe to be passed down, just a reminder, made in a thin voice over a crackling international phone call straddling time zones, to use brown sugar.

When Nana made the cakes, she made them a month in advance of Christmas and we drove up to get ours. We always seemed to make the drive at night. Sunk deep into the back seat of the car, I stared up and out of the window to catch the first sight of the illuminated city, promising myself that one day I would live in a high-rise and also be a bright window of light in a night sky. Once at Nana’s, my brother and I were layered into bunk beds. Leaning out a little, I could twitch the nylon lace curtain aside and watch the traffic go by. Double-decker buses satisfied me best. The towerblocks we’d driven past glowed with intimations of varied and sovereign lives. Now those lives roared past my brother and me, the buses glowing, their two decks packed with many faces alive with possibility. Later next day, we got ready to leave and make the drive back down in dreary daylight. I was told to retrieve a cake from where they were stashed under the sideboard, each one housed in a dented biscuit tin – the kind that had once held Christmas biscuit assortments. I pried open the lids to find the ones with cake - there was always one full of old keys.

Our cake came with us down south. We packed it into the car and waved our goodbyes. But that cake was headed south in more ways than one. It was bound for doom and damnation – in the form of Drink. My grandparents’ household was strictly teetotal. I was always told that Poppa’s years of war service on the submarines had shown him the evils of the bottle , and no-one was allowed to bring drink into his house. Herein lay a problem. A fruitcake is the most immortal of cakes, as weighty and mindful as a cheese. But its longevity must be procured through intoxicants. Sherry or rum, brandy or whisky: a fruitcake needs its tipple. So the removal of the cake from Nana’s to our kitchen was a smuggler’s run, and Poppa, who observed the handover in silence, must have known it.

Home again, I watched as the cake was unwrapped from its double-jacket of greaseproof paper and foil, revealing its pocked, seductive surface. The common practice, at this stage of things, is to stab the top of the cake with a skewer, or maybe a knitting needle, and then drizzle your liquor of choice over the holes, allowing it to sink in. Feeding the cake once a week or so renders it succulent and vivacious come Christmas. My mother, however, felt that this was doing things half-mast. Although there was many a knitting needle in our house – including a strange set of metal ones, sharpened to a renovated point by my teetotaler grandfather – my mother eschewed craft for science. She had a nurse friend, who wore starched white and navy uniforms, cinched with an affecting belt. This friend crept on regulation soles down a gleaming, squeaky corridor to a stock cupboard and acquired my mother a large hypodermic needle. Each week we undressed the cake and my mother drew a length of amber-coloured sherry into the syringe, then repeatedly pierced and incrementally released the liquid into the body of the cake, a drop welling up at the site of each puncture. I watched, entranced. Injections are particularly pertinent to the young, because they are such a definite encounter with state-sanctioned pain. They work in a phantasmal future, protecting you from diseases that others got before you, but from which your generation will be saved if you just – and you must! – surrender to the needle. And the fruitcake yielded, too, or perhaps it yielded on my behalf – accepting the slow slide of the long needle without sting, without complaint.

My family recipe, then, is for a brown sugar cake that betrays temperance and accuracies of inventory, and that gains its long life (as many of us do) with a little help from the medical profession. My first task, clearly, was to get hold of a large bottle of brandy. My second was to procure a hypodermic needle. And my third was to find a recipe with actual, measurable ingredients. The brandy and the recipe were easy – a well stocked drinks cabinet provided one and Nigel Slater stood gamely in for grandma, providing the other.

The second of my tasks stumped me for a while. I solicited a medical friend – a doctor. He cheerily agreed, but it turns out that doctors aren’t allowed in stockrooms, and after two abortive attempts to duck into one, he said my chances were slim. Nevertheless a few days later he was successful; a nurse sympathetic to the cause had been enlisted, I was now the owner of a sizeable syringe and a selection of sterile-packed needles – “We’re not trained what gauge to use for fruitcake,” he explained.

Furnished with contraband, I was ready to summon ingredients. A fruitcake must possess the gallantry of crumb, not be simply frenzied with fruit. And the fruits themselves – they should not be painted into living-dead charades of summer colour. They must be dark, they must not deny that they are aged, they must carry with them the signs of their survival. It seems to me that a fruitcake is indeed an audacious creature, but its audacity is a consequence of sly hoardings, dubious exchanges and shameless incongruities. A fruitcake is a brazen and aging hussy, tossing its head at strictures of season and locale, demanding indulgence, flaunting acquisition. It is an American southerner who tells it best; Truman Capote, who knew something about fruitcake, delivers a tale of the making of Christmas cakes that pairs an abandoned child and a simple, elderly cousin, raking ingredients out of the leaves of poverty and disavowal. The cakes are soaked in moonshine, bundled into a baby carriage and mailed to a president.

A fruitcake mixes fruits of the vine with those of the tree and the bush, all stolen from their own time, delayed into another. These fruits are picked at their peak of ripeness only to be dried, wizened for futurity, then revived again, swelled by alcohol itself aged and stored and fermented. A fruitcake violates generation and seasons and then revels in its own untimeliness – prepared in advance, preserved and often eaten long after the festival it marks. An aunt of mine was once at a wake where fruitcake was served. A nippy plate circulator observed my aunt's pleasure as she took the first bite and commented, “Good cake isn’t it? Corpse baked it herself.”

Cake thou art, and unto cake shalt thou return. Fruitcake is dyed with tannins, and it ingests its own avarice, starting to recall the blackest, earliest kinds of wealth, returning the cake to the sod that grew it. I therefore filled mine with the darker fruits - figs and prunes – fruits that saturate and irritate, and with the woodier, less prancing nuts – hazelnuts and walnuts. And my sugar was the most treacle brown I could find. I injected the cake over several weeks, and then I pressed the heavy blade of my largest knife to its firm crust and cut it like peat, its wet, half-ancient geology finally exposed.

SYLLABUS: FRUITCAKESlightly adapted from Nigel SlaterThis is a large cake, enough to feed 16.

You will also need a 24-25cm cake tin with a removable base, fully lined with a double layer of lightly buttered greaseproof paper or nonstick baking paper, which should come at least 5cm above the top of the tin. If you skip this bit, the edges of the cake will burn.

Set the oven to 160 C/gas mark 3. Cream the butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl from time to time with a spatula.

While the butter and sugars are beating to a light and fluffy texture, cut the dried fruits into small pieces, removing the hard stalks from the figs. Add the eggs to the mixture one at a time - it will curdle but don't worry - then slowly mix in the ground almonds, hazelnuts, all the dried fruit, the brandy, the citrus zest and juice.

Now mix the baking powder and flour together and fold them lightly into the mix. Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin, smoothing the top gently, and put it in the oven. Leave it for an hour, then, without opening the oven door, turn down the heat to 150 C/gas mark 2 and continue cooking for 2 hours.

Check to see whether the cake is done by inserting a skewer into the centre. It should come out with just a few crumbs attached but no trace of raw cake mixture. Take the cake out of the oven and leave it to cool before removing it from the tin.

19 Comments:

Ahoy, Syllabub! By Gob, this time ye've done the impossible -- banished the spectre of them nasty store-boughts and revived the ancient and toothsome delights of what we on the sea call the "real-deal" fruitcake! I'm lickin' the screen, deary!

Ah, delicious it is -- every word of it, and how it brings back the memory of it on me tongue!

You write like a dream, my love -- the story of the wanderers, the evocation of the meadow and the biscuit tins and the hypodermic needle and the cake made by the corpse herself --

-- it is pure genius.

And to celebrate, I opened my jar of Flying Dragon Marmalade for the first time and had some -- it is so delicate, so well, flying dragonish, I felt as if I were royalty in some olden time having nightingale tongues. It's hidden behind the mustard at the bottom of the 'fridge, lest you-know-who should find it and take it where he took all the rest of the fruitcake when I wasn't looking!

Ah, delicious it is -- every word of it, and how it brings back the memory of it on me tongue!

You write like a dream, my love -- the story of the wanderers, the evocation of the meadow and the biscuit tins and the hypodermic needle and the cake made by the corpse herself --

-- it is pure genius.

And to celebrate, I opened my jar of Flying Dragon Marmalade for the first time and had some -- it is so delicate, so well, flying dragonish, I felt as if I were royalty in some olden time having nightingale tongues. It's hidden behind the mustard at the bottom of the 'fridge, lest you-know-who should find it and take it where he took all the rest of the fruitcake when I wasn't looking!

Golly. Seven years with no fruit cake? That is indeed a terrible drought and no mistake.

Me, I LOVE glace cherries and doggedly resist the current trend for replacing them with (horror!) REAL cherries, wot actually TASTE like cherries. All things in their place.

Now, a fruit cake that I am very fond of indeed is a Dundee Cake. It masquerades as a rather more presbyterian and sober cake than your boozy affair, but the liberal half-cherries (the more glace the better) and the roast almonds on the top suggest a certain louche tendency. Let me know if you want my mother's excellent recipe to try for yourself!

One more thing. You don't discuss the thorny topic of icing, but I would just like to post my customary Rant against the Rise of Fondant. Please assure me that you are an ardent believer in Royal Icing?

Do you frost your fruitcakes? I have a recipie for plum pudding, suspiciously similar to the fruitcake, calling for brandy sauce but no frosting, and an old fruitcake tin with a dented lid that lets bits of raisins into the boiling pot. We lit it on fire at my fiancee's home, then each ate a tiny sliver: dramatic and delicious.

Yes, the "thorny topic of icing" -- indeed. The cakes I grew up eating were jacketed in marzipan, then royal iced. Flat iced, many layers, with shells piped along the edges and a red satin ribbon tied round their flanks.

I do believe in royal versus fondant as msksquared hopes, though (see earlier birthday cake post), I sometimes fall for fondant's shallow charms too.

But my cake this year remained un-iced - I may prefer the taste of it, and anyway, life was much too hectic this December to do anything.

Despite my misleading accent, fruitcake is not in my heritage at all. Christmas meant the lofty panettone, or even the stodgy yet tasty Stollen, and though my mum sometimes bought a tiny xmas pud to satisfy what she sees as my English nature we always insulted it as we ate it (disguised of course with plenty of brandy butter).

And the fruitcakes? Raided in January in Other People's houses. Always drying out in their dented biscuit tins, always too sweet, and quite definitely insufficiently boozy. As for the icing: I once lived in a house in Brighton whose inner walls were covered in that white, texturized, dangerously peaked, rock-hard icing (or something very like it). So some scary associations there.

I wish I had tried yours. Something about the peat-image is just making me slaver. ("Be true to the earth!" as Nietzsche once said.)

Having been raised to despise fruitcake (not by my mother, who was the only one who would eat the neon-studded offerings of the church ladies) your description, and the taste of the actual cake, I have to say, is a marvel. I can attest to its ability to startle even the most avowed disbeliever--just watch their faces as the first bite starts to dissolve, which of course doesn't take long, given the rich boggy texture. Anyway, I am stingy in my appreciation of cakes, perhaps because they break my heart too often (what looks good can turn to carboard on the tongue, sigh) so thanks for encouraging me back into the saddle Syllabub!

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I just made this cake today, it is in the oven as I write! Little tough, I don't know what gas marker 3 and 2 are. I'm guessing 400 and 350 degrees?

I've adapted the recipe slightly to suit my west coast self-sufficient lifestyle (using only fruit I can grow and dry and have on hand). Also, local honey instead of sugar, and Amaretto in lieu of the Brandy (didn't have brandy in the cupboard).

Apparently, 400 F degrees is higher than gas mark 3, the cake was burned on the outside and although I turned it down to 350 F, it cooked in under two hours. The upside, cut off the burned bit and it is scrumptious still, gallantry of crumb and all.

We always want to cook the best and the healthiest recipe that we can find from the internet. As a mother, I always want that and in able to keep up with those needs, I need to be focused and be creative. I always have Gourmandia on my side to give me the appropriate recipes for the day and for me not to reiterate the recipe that I did the other day! It’s just so innovative!